The microscopic phasespace approach URQMD is used to investigate the stopping power and particle production in heavy systems at SPS and RHIC energies. We find no gap in the baryon rapidity distribution even at RHIC. For CERN energies URQMD shows a pile up of baryons and a supression of multi-nucleon clusters at midrapidity.

A study of secondary Drell-Yan production in nuclear collisions is presented for SPS energies. In addition to the lepton pairs produced in the initial collisions of the projectile and target nucleons, we consider the potentially high dilepton yield from hard valence antiquarks in produced mesons and antibaryons. We calculate the secondary Drell-Yan contributions taking the collision spectrum of hadrons from the microscopic model URQMD. The con- tributions from meson-baryon interactions, small in hadron-nucleus interac- tions, are found to be substantial in nucleus-nucleus collisions at low dilepton masses. Preresonance collisions of partons may further increase the yields.

We perform an event-by-event analysis of the transverse momentum distribution of final state particles in central Pb(160AGeV)+Pb collisions within a microscopic non-equilibrium transport model (UrQMD). Strong influence of rescattering is found. The extracted momentum distributions show less fluctuations in A+A collisions than in p+p reactions. This is in contrast to simplified p+p extrapolations and random walk models.

The extend to which geometrical effects contribute to the production and suppression of the J/psi and qq minijet pairs in general is investigated for high energy heavy ion collisions at SPS, RHIC and LHC energies. For the energy range under investigation, the geometrical e ects referred to are shadowing and anti-shadowing, respectively. Due to those effects, the parton distributions in nuclei deviate from the naive extrapolation from the free nucleon result; fA 6= AfN. The strength of the shadowing/anti-shadowing e ect increases with the mass number. Therefore it is interesting to see the di erence between cross sections for e.g. S+U vs. Pb+Pb at SPS. The recent NA50 results for the survival probability of produced J/psi s has attracted great attention and are often interpreted as a signature of a quark gluon plasma. This publication will present a fresh look on hard QCD e ects for the charmonium production level. It is shown that the apparent suppression of J/psi s must also be linked to the production process. Due to the uncertainty in the shadowing of gluons the suppression of charmonium states might not give reli- able information on a created plasma phase at the collider energies soon available. The consequences of shadowing e ects for the xF distribution of J/psi s at s = 20 GeV, s = 200 GeV and s = 6 TeV are calculated for some relevant combinations of nuclei, as well as the pT distribution of minijets at midrapidity for Nf = 4 in the final state.

We study J/psi suppression in AB collisions assuming that the charmonium states evolve from small, color transparent configurations. Their interaction with nucleons and nonequilibrated, secondary hadrons is simulated using the microscopic model UrQMD. The Drell-Yan lepton pair yield and the J/psi Drell-Yan ratio are calculated as a function of the neutral transverse energy in Pb+Pb collisions at 160 GeV and found to be in reasonable agreement with existing data.